Classic change management advice doesn’t apply to transformational change.

"I had fallen into the trap of treating a transformational change like a tactical one."

I’ve been a student of leadership for a long time. I’ve spent the past couple decades studying what the top scholars in the space have to say, even meeting and working with some. I’ve rolled up my sleeves in the field, partnering with many well-respected companies on leadership development initiatives. It’s fair to say I love this.

One perennial focus of the talent development field is how to lead change. These days, you can’t shake a stick without running into someone talking about the need for digital transformation, culture change, or some other kind of major change. Recently, I’ve been studying and working with clients on change and transformation. And I’ve been living through it at my organization. What I have discovered is that leading transformation at the top is different—and requires a new way of thinking.

Confident and experienced

I had spent a large portion of my career at a division of Harvard Business School helping build its corporate learning practice. Working at a big university has some great advantages, but those typically didn’t include a lack of hierarchy or speed in decision making. Still, I was always able to drive grassroots change. I would see an opportunity or a problem; I would try something cool and new with a client to address it; and fairly often, the rest of the organization would see that it worked and adapt it for broader use. I was successful that way for 15 years—I broke a lot of new ground and even won some awards for my work.

When I had the opportunity to take over as the senior vice president of learning strategy for Cambridge Leadership Group, I was excited. I had joined the team because the founder and I cared about many of the same things. Some of the same scholars in the field had inspired us. We each had our own hard-won set of experiences and wanted to make a difference by making great ideas about leadership accessible and practical for people in the real world.

Leading organizational transformation is probably the toughest thing anyone can sign up to do.

The core of the work the team had been doing was great, but it simply wasn’t sustainable doing it the same way anymore. Everyone agreed some changes were needed. After proving myself on some key client projects, I was given the reins on core content, point of view, and program design. I had a mandate to overhaul and update the offering set. I was thrilled at the chance to shape the evolution of our offerings. I finally had authority from the CEO, and this would be a chance to apply all the expertise I had built without having to swim upstream.

Following the charted path

I started out the same way many would have. First, I made sure everyone had a chance to give input and that we were all clear on the problems we wanted to solve. Then I went about determining the solutions: revamping core frameworks, restructuring programs, adding in the missing pieces, and getting rid of some things that were in the way.

I spent a lot of time talking through the changes with everyone—in one-on-ones, group meetings, conference calls, and emails. I provided new tools that the delivery team never had before. We talked about phasing and pacing the changes. I scheduled myself to ride along and observe program delivery so we could adjust and refine together. The entire team was on board. Change management experts would have been fairly pleased with the process.

Failing

It didn’t work. In spite of all the agreement, facilitators found reasons to change course at the last minute and return to old methods. People used small operational discussions to rehash broader questions we had officially decided on earlier. Team meetings began to feel arduous and repetitive. At one point, I told the CEO that I may be wasting my time and that he should tell me if he wanted to return to past methods.

The problem wasn’t that people didn’t see the need for change. Rather, I had fallen into the trap of treating a transformational change like a tactical one. While we needed to make all the product updates I had put in place and more, we needed to transform the organization for any of it to work.

So much of the classic change management advice is based on a common set of assumptions. It envisions a defined initiative with known solutions moving from one steady state to another, with the leader driving top-down with a big focus on getting the right processes, systems, and structure.

But most of the biggest challenges facing businesses today don’t look like that. Companies are coping with new technologies that are reshaping industries, generational trends that are yielding a new workforce and a new customer base, and other challenging situations. When organizations are trying to deal with transformational change, the assumptions look very different:

• The scope is ambiguous with broad implications for the business.

• They don’t have a complete handle on the problem yet, never mind established solutions.

• They don’t have the luxury of long, steady states punctuated by short periods of change.

• Meeting these challenges requires active engagement across the entire organization.

• While companies may need new processes and systems, the bigger challenge is how they are going to get their people and culture to make the shift.

The more your challenges look like that, the more classic change management advice won’t be enough.

Reframing the challenge

Companies need more than a simple process, and formal authority alone won’t get them there. In fact, leading organizational transformation is probably the toughest thing anyone can sign up to do.

Here are three lessons I learned through the experience:

Scope is always bigger than you think. My CEO had presented me with a seemingly straightforward task: Update the core products. Yet, no one on the team fully anticipated all the implications or the depth of change this task would require. That’s normal.

Transformational challenges often start out looking like tactical ones. Even when you receive what looks like a simple assignment, keep digging deeper to find the transformational work. Once my executive team started talking through all the implications, we made even more progress in other areas of the business than our CEO had thought would be possible.

Redefine relationships; otherwise, new processes won’t matter. At the university, long-time faculty didn’t want someone coming in and telling them what to do. They were proud of their individual expertise and ability to make it work. What they weren’t seeing was the toll a lack of structure was placing on themselves and our clients. I needed to redefine the relationship between product and delivery so the faculty members could see my role as providing the tools for them to do great work rather than constraining it. Otherwise, nothing would change. When one faculty member came back from an engagement saying he was doing his best work in years and having more fun, I knew we were making progress.

This is not for the faint of heart. Leading transformation is emotionally demanding. It requires you to be a disruptive force and shake things up. You have to talk about problems and challenge deeply held values. You have to ask people to stop doing things that they have been doing for a long time. They will push back, and it won’t be all rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes the pushback will be justified and help you refine your own thinking. Other times, you’ll need to strap in and ride it out.

I had to accept the fact that, no matter how well I articulated my case in advance, people needed to live through the transformation in phases. Understand that this is all part of the process. When you pull it off, it will have been worth it.

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